2024—my bones break against blue borders

Revisiting and repurposing my photographic archive

Exhibited at Pakhuis de Zwijger, Amsterdam

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Installation photography from my bones break against blue borders at Pakhuis de Zwijger
October 2024
Amsterdam, The Netherlands

From Pakhuis de Zwijger’s website:

Every month we present new art in our café-restaurant. This month Eli Hooper exhibits his work: my bones break against blue borders; a selection of images he made over the last five years that try to portray notions of alienation, home, and nostalgia. In this work, Eli wants to explore how the past is remembered after being physically away from it, as well as how home, for most, is no longer a physical space.

Who are you and what kind of work do you make?

I am a New Zealand-born, Rotterdam-based artist. Currently, I’m exploring the cross-pollination between media, mass popular culture, and the digitization of nostalgia through an investigative and autonomous lens. I work primarily with nostalgia, the concept of home, and the steady digitization of our lives, exploring these through nostalgic signifiers of the past twenty to thirty years (such as video games, old book covers, and obsolete media). While I primarily use photographic and audio-visual media, I employ both practical and unconventional printing, recording, and display methods to challenge how we engage with not only the image pool but also the mass archiving and consumption of media around us. My process involves a combination of material and conceptual research to collectively question how we remember our past when physically distant from it and how we define ourselves through the consumption of cultural products. What does our nostalgia or longing for a specific time look like as it becomes increasingly digitized?

Which work are you exhibiting at Pakhuis de Zwijger right now?

I’ve chosen to show a selection of photographic works from the past five years, titled my bones break against blue borders. Most images are part of my first conceptual project, “a borrowed home: reflections on roots,” in which I tried to deal with the alienation from my birthplace felt whenever I returned. Taken over two visits, I walked around the streets of my childhood, documenting and recording them through the lens of nostalgia and discomfort that I was feeling, in an attempt to create a sense of home within these images. I think because of the personal significance of this project, the attention to nostalgia, alienation, and identity have and will always remain in my work. So, I saw fit to include other images from my practice. Especially, now that I’ve been formally integrating for permanent residence in Europe (hence the work’s title, after the “Blauwe Rand” from Dutch integration exams), the images take on a new lens I’d like to explore.

Why did you create and want to exhibit this work?

I hope to convey the relationship between home / belonging, nostalgia / future, and prompt the viewer to think about their own relationship to home. I love to make something and then people look at it and have that kind of visceral memory trigger. It doesn’t happen for everybody as all our nostalgia is different. My next step might be finding a way to make everybody experience such a nostalgic feeling at once, but no idea how to do that yet.

I think for myself it’s important to exhibit this period of work because I never felt confident enough to show it to the public, whereas now I look back and go “huh, these are great!” I always like my work more in retrospect, something I’m trying to work on right now.

What material do you prefer to work with, and why?

I’ve been really attracted to archival material and found footage. My current body of work is based around video game screenshots or things I find online, and then I cyanotype them onto canvas. I really like to tap into that part of people’s brains that is enveloped by warm and fuzzy nostalgia. People hold some childhood artifacts so dearly to them, and I want to make work that reminds them of these things.

Where do you get your inspiration from?

Anything on the internet. I love the internet, I love that I spent too much time on it as a kid, I love the fact there’s a massive crazy weird world that’s all around us. It’s bigger than our planet, it’s huge! I daydream about the internet a lot.

What would you do if you were not an artist?

I’ve always wanted to work in the video game industry. I think video games, if done properly, are the most amazing art form. Otherwise, I would love to be a director of photography or film director, or writer, I don’t know. There’s a lot, I dream about other lives I could live. I’d love to be a professional chauffeur or something and just drive some person around. Watching Drive My Car really made me want to do that. But I’m definitely romanticizing that a bit. I don’t have a license.

Images from my bones break against blue borders

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